


Progression

by searchmaton



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: American Sign Language, Blood, Child Murder, Codependency, Gen, POV Second Person, Suicide, Time Loop, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-29
Updated: 2015-12-01
Packaged: 2018-05-03 23:25:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5311055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/searchmaton/pseuds/searchmaton
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been an exceptionally long time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Grounded

**Author's Note:**

> just what you needed, more sad sans fic.
> 
> i've never actually done this before.

The kid-- who isn't much of a kid anymore-- is maturing backwards.

This isn't true in any technical sense, they're growing as you've heard humans typically do, expanding like an oddly-shaped balloon at a party you can't stop them from throwing you. You never believed that you could stop them, though that never stopped you from trying, never stopped you from bloodying your metacarpals in the beginning. There isn't much point in that these days.

You're rarely around to see the pooling red or exposed splinters of bones unsettlingly like your own lately.

Lately, of course, being a relative term and especially relative within the temporal labyrinth the two of you have been living in. The same one that leads you to be standing at the foot of your bed, barely containing a scream as you notice that the air is abruptly a few weeks too fresh, and your jacket is _sans_ a few holes, and the single platitude you've begun to offer your poor brother is gone. Likely returned to the living room, likely with the same stack of sticky notes mashed against it's fibers. You'll pick up your sock again in a few weeks time, or maybe a month.

Or maybe you won't bother this time around, because you're tired and because this has been going on far too long for you to bear. You never know anymore. These things directly conflict with the comfort you offer yourself, the comfort of staying perfectly still.

You begin to recite a new number in your head and try not to mind it too much.

In a few hours, you'll tell your brother you've come down with the flu. That will allow you at least a week to lose, staring down through the rows of your ribs and trying your best to stay awake without occupying yourself.

You'd rather not attempt to count the days in midnight snacks. Most of them, none if you're honest, are very memorable anymore. Papyrus, ever the vigilant cool larger brother, continues to refrigerate plate after plate of spaghetti for you. He shoots you worried looks whenever you drift into the same space and you think if there's anything that does still touch you it's loving him. Unlike you, he's never stopped being a great brother. For your part you only have puns and promises of re-calibrated puzzles when you're feeling less grave.

The week moves troublingly quickly. Troubling enough for you to know that it hasn't actually been a week when Frisk emerges from the Ruins much earlier than they have been, coated in what you would love to think is flour. You're mindful not to look into Alphys' hidden camera as you walk, a little too briskly and lacking in any requisite display of fear or anger. They have a rolling pin clutched in their hand and tears are prickling at the corners of their eyes. It's not the guilt of somebody who has performed an irreversible evil, not that it ever was.

"Sorry, kiddo."

They nod at you, doe eyes glistening and you wish that they at least wouldn't look at you every time this happens. You're compelled by spite to put a pair of bones through their eyes, ulna and radius. A deceptively humane death. In theory, Papyrus would be proud of you. In practice, he's always devastated at the sight of mangled human corpses and you're ever thankful that the short and disastrous timelines are followed by quick resets. You kneel in the snow next to your crumpled, powder-coated human.

As suddenly as they came, they've vanished along with an extra few inches of snow around your knee joints. You make note of the number. 263.

Sometimes, you almost feel up to it. Usually when you're waking up to a fresh timeline because you let your guard down for long enough to get something akin to meaningful rest and Papyrus is nearby as far as you can tell by him calling your name. This isn't one of those times and you tread your way back to your house in the ever-present snow.

If you let yourself conceptualize 263 as chunks of time that last days to weeks to months, it starts to weigh you down. It's heavier when you consider that the higher the number, the longer they've been lasting on average.

You can't tell if it's heavier or lighter when you take into consideration that you spent the first hundred or so of those were spent sticking to a formula and repeatedly brutalizing a kid who was essentially a stranger to you apart from having murdered your friends, family and colleagues. Thankfully they're growing down. You wince when the door groans out into the empty space of your living room as you enter the house. You count down from _five, four, three, two_...

"SANS?"

Papyrus has always been predictable in these specific instances. Vigilant even in his sleep, and whether it's because he truly is vigilant or if he's just a strange kind of sensitive, you swear you could measure the exact decibel above which a noise could wake him.

"yeah, i'm here paps." You respond as he appears at the top of the stairs from his bedroom doorway. "went out for a walk. snow way i could sleep with that din out there."

"SANS, THE SNOW IS COMPLETELY SILENT! WE HAVEN'T HAD A STORM IN WEEKS!" Not by your count, but his familiar groaning is comforting. He scowls at you and sighs as you grin up at him. "GET BACK INTO BED."

"aye aye, captain."

You aren't inclined to question exactly how much older you are than him now, beyond the physical. As far as you're both concerned, Papyrus is taller, and therefore the big brother. You'll never stop being proud of him for taking on that kind of responsibility, disregarding that you really don't want it. It was yours when you were young and your subscription to the idea of linear time hadn't run out, and you can only thank whatever incompetent force that was stringing you all along that Papyrus had grown into somebody ambitious before it started tying the world into knots. You doubt your mentoring had anything to do with it.

With the things you've seen, you've begun to doubt that you have any effect at all.

Unlocking the door to your room, the last bits of snow caked onto your toe bones slough off onto the carpet and you flop onto your bed, pushing the crumpled sheets onto the floor. You'll have small water stains in your carpet for a while to act as a reminder, as if you still needed one. You're relieved to know that Frisk will remain in the Ruins for longer than they typically do, as they tend to after. Well.

In any case, you haven't slept in too long and after a while impromptu naps stop cutting it. The result is the same whether you sleep voluntarily or not, so you're not sure why you keep this up. Maybe just because sleep deprivation makes everything seem more like a dream and less like reality. Timelines cannot, however, change the passage of days.

Tomorrow is an inevitability.

\-----

Three months behind the original schedule and Frisk stumbles out of the door to the Ruins, some semblance of a smile on their face. You're always glad to see that, much more glad than when they were smaller and ignorant and doing everything on some violent babybone whim. Though they had since told you a few times over that the whims had a name, once-chubby fingers moving awkwardly to form the letters.

Today's fingers are long and slender and move elegantly, bold and used to communicating. They hold their thumb and forefinger together in a circle and gaze at you through it over one of their eyes in a silly representation of you and you would smile at them if you weren't always smiling. You instead strike a pose and blow a lipless kiss in return. They tremble in a silent giggle and run up to high-five you. You have to lean up into it now.

Somehow, your hands come away interlaced, their fingers threaded through the spaces that would form your palm if you were more than just bones. They lead you gently to Grillby's, as if they might shatter you if you move too quickly.

They'd know your limits better than anyone apart from Papyrus.

"we don't have too long before paps comes back around." You say, nodding to Grillby as you talk to them in a low voice. "what's the big idea?"

Motioning to themself and then drawing their hand across their chest to rest above the seat of their soul in a sign you had originally needed broken down to you, they inform you that it is their birthday. You ignore your own discomfort to beam up at them and they respond in kind before replying to the question you haven't gotten a chance to ask.

They hold their thumb out in a horizontal thumbs up and then flip their hand so that their palm is facing you and their thumb is overlapping their folded middle finger. Ah.

"the big one-eight. thank god your mom's a goat." They stare blankly at you for a moment until you lean in and whisper into their ear. "you're still a kid."

Frisk looks about ready to flip the table, which is thankfully a bar. They vehemently sign twin forefingers repeatedly slamming against their thumb, staccato NOs to express their disapproval. It leaves you wheezing and trying your best not to either fall off of the barstool that you're sitting on or laugh loudly enough to draw the attention of every single other patron. When you look up, Grillby is flickering and crackling in his own soft chuckling. Frisk's face is pink and they are visibly trying not to laugh.

You are glad at least that Frisk is old enough that nobody looks at them and thinks of the humans they learned about. With the adopted royal child and the other souls all having been children, you suppose it makes sense that they associate humans as being small and ample. You remember and your laughter practically dies in your throat.

The friend in front of you gazes at you, concerned.

"naw, kid, i'm fine."

It looks almost like they want to prod further but they have already learned these things about you. You suffer in silence, or at least in a sea of puns and nigh-intolerable jokes. Instead they sign, I am not a kid!

"oh yeah? then what are you?"

Frisk pauses for a moment and then replies, 「M-X. Q-U-I-N-G of the universe.」

"quing? that's a new one. pick it up from blooky or did you make it up yourself?" The smile that they give in response is all the answer that you need. Straight from the mind of Mx. Quing of the Universe themself. Incredible. "well, q-o'-the-u, i think it's about time we got going."

You hop down from your barstool after sliding a few gold across the bar and give Grillby a little half-salute. He returns the gesture without showing any signs of questioning that you didn't order anything. As far as you're concerned, you've made good choices with your few static friendships and Grillbz is a testament to that.

Pressing the door open with their back, Frisk says, 「I have to talk to you about something later.」

"then we'll just have to make sure we both have a," you pause for dramatic effect, "later."

Winking, you leave Frisk pouting in the snow.

You vomit almost immediately upon appearing in your lab. The small yellow-orange puddle of goop pools at your feet, soaking into your slippers and reflecting a faint blue flicker from your face that you hadn't realized had begun to emanate from your eye. You think of fat little human limbs and darker puddles, not viscous enough and too red to be ketchup. You think of that substance matting up Asgore's fur from afar.

Breathing deeply, you let yourself slump against the wall. You'd decided somewhere along the line that ~~you wouldn't lose anybody else~~ that you would try this time, that Frisk as they are now deserved a better friend than you had been.

Frisk isn't giving up though, keeps trying to smile even though they've played their part in just as many if not more deaths than you have, has ended your life as many times as you have ended theirs. With the other children, you only had to sit through a couple of resets before... What? What had happened? If this was a choice Frisk was certainly intent on making it. Your had met your little perseverant friend only once, and not for very long. Now they're just a soul in a jar and a memory of blood and dust.

It occurs to you, not for the first time, that the same could have happened to Frisk. That the same still _could_ happen to Frisk.

Ever since they'd outgrown their puppet strings, or whatever homicidal impulse had driven them into your bones, they'd been so insistent upon saving everybody. They'd put you through eight years of the same miserable span of time punctuated by deaths and you'd forgiven them, continued to protect them. You admit to yourself, not for the first time, that your motivations aren't anywhere near selfless. In this way you know that theirs aren't either.

You think that saving people has a lot to do with neurosis and loneliness. Frisk has been through what you've been through and more, just like you've been through more before them.

For the first time, you admit to yourself that even after watching them tear through the underground dozens of times, you're afraid that they'll give up trying to save everyone. Afraid that they'll leave you to face the fallout alone. Afraid that they'll give up like you have.

I owe it to all of them, they sign meekly at you in some distant memory. Do you owe it to Frisk? You clean up your mess before it congeals and head back into the snow.


	2. Lycopene and Hemoglobin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have no idea what i am doing but i hope that it hurts.
> 
> god help me i hope i remember to go back and reformat frisk's lines in the other goddamned chapters.

They have no trouble at all befriending Papyrus, they never have and it's even easier now. Frisk is much better at playing the scared, surprised human in an _unfamiliar_ environment than you've ever been, opting out of their usual date entirely and somehow ending up buttering up your brother until they both end up in the kitchen with Papyrus looming over them, affectionately criticizing their purposely bad attempts at making spaghetti. The sentimental warmth watching them work so hard to make Pap feel even better about himself flows through your bones.

You prefer to dismiss the accompanying bitterness, and so you find things to do. The days where they stay in Snowdin are the hardest as much as they are the easiest, and you struggle to seem occupied while Papyrus spends more time at home. You do your laundry for the first time in a few resets, cringing at the state seemingly every fiber in your room has reached.

And if you are suddenly very enthralled with menial tasks you haven't done in what are extreme lengths of time in your eyes, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're avoiding whatever is coming. You're not at all concerned with whatever it is Frisk is so intent on talking to you about. You're certainly not very thankful that for as powerful as the newly-adult human is, you're much better at moving undetected.

The way that their eyes rest on you when you're doing TV night with them and Paps is alarming.

Their russet eyes seem a lot redder and their features keep twisting into something outright _malicious_ , something you can still only relate to lycopene and hemoglobin and the knowledge that you have to act on whatever strange compulsion leads you to play the hero just late enough to fail at saving anyone.

You try to pointedly avoid looking at them.

"LOOK, LOOK FRISK! BROTHER! METTATON IS ABOUT TO SMOOCH THE GHOST!" As excited as Papyrus is, you feel uneasy and this is the forty-third time that you have watched this episode on this day, with or without Frisk present. You're kind enough not to tell him that the next episode reveals that the ghost is actually a metaphor for Mettaton himself in a dream sequence that it isn't revealed he's stuck in until the end of the season. The segment ends and you're bombarded with advertisements.

"and now it _ghost_ to commercial." Papyrus glares daggers at you.

"NO, YOU CANNOT RUIN THIS HISTORIC MOMENT IN TELEVISION HISTORY WITH YOUR PUNS! I REFUSE!" You snicker and try to look like you aren't debating the possibility of suicide with yourself.

There is absolutely no point in killing yourself. You've been found dead much more than your fair share of times and went out quietly in the night just as many. Owing to your unique situation, you wake up perfectly alive from something that is much closer to a restful sleep than you ever get without dying for it. Unfortunately this impermanence means that you would likely traumatize your brother for no reason but to wake up at some point to a freshly-reset, angrier-than-ever Frisk.

You think that you could handle life being unfair if you could just put a cleaver through your own skull and even the score.

Papyrus is yelling about Mettaton and your soul must be paying rent somewhere that isn't your body by now. You feel red-brown eyes on you. Sweat runs down your skull.

"SANS! I'M GLAD YOU'VE BEEN KEEPING YOURSELF BUSY LATELY BUT THERE'S NO EXCUSE FOR YOU TO BE FALLING ASLEEP ON THE COUCH WHILE SOMEBODY IS TRYING TO TALK TO YOU!" Frisk signs their agreement at you from behind him and you can't bring yourself to trust it one bit when they typically spend their visits sleeping in your bed.

"sorry bro. guess i'm just..." You pause for dramatic effect, wondering at the back of your mind if Grillby would let you stay in the back room for the night while Papyrus preemptively makes displeased noises, "bone tired."

Paps screams and even the tiny ball of displeasure behind him breathes out the illusion of a cackle. You would feel accomplished if you felt like you still could.

"JUST GO TO BED, YOU MONSTER!"

"we're both monsters, paps."

"YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN!"

"i got you, bro. hope you two have a metta _ton_ of fun without me." Sighing dramatically, you slide off of the couch and onto the floor before heaving yourself up and heading up the stairs, aware of two pairs of eyes on you as you ascend. You're having some trouble getting over the _stares_. When you reach your room, you shut the door without locking it and turn off the light.

It feels juvenile, sneaking out through your own bedroom window. It's felt juvenile all week. Eventually Frisk is going to find you at the inn, so you decide to try the library tonight. You've already read all of the books a few times so you've started defacing the reading materials with jokes and your own special flavor of esoteric explanations for things in science fiction.

You're bored out of your skull in general. You're also beginning to feel irrationally terrified of your only friend, and until the timeline is freed from it's Gordian knot, you can't afford to find more friends. You can't afford nights crying at godawful anime with Alphys like you thought you could once. You'd love to maintain that you feel nothing but apathy and ennui anymore, but frankly it hurts to lose these things, especially repeatedly. It hurts that it hurts.

Papyrus gets out of bed at exactly 5:00 every morning. Frisk won't rat you out because somehow for the two of you that always leads to explanations that nobody wants to give and nobody wants to believe, because you have no reason to be avoiding Frisk and nobody can lie to Papyrus when he just looks so dejected over you not liking his new friend. You're safe in that aspect. 

The seconds tick by excruciatingly slowly. You alternate between paying far too much attention to your scribblings, down to pushing around the tiny shards of graphite with the tip of your pencil, or losing time. Lost time doesn't really bother you anymore.

If you still thought of the surface as an eventuality as you did when you were young and naive and the kind of monster that could impress that sort of hopeful naivete on a younger brother, you would lament that monsters would have to pay a lot less attention to hours and numbers if they were circling around something very hot and very bright. A sun for example.

4:30 and you're headed to your sentry station to pretend that you're having an extremely early morning by your backwards standards. Papyrus will be so proud of you and if you're lucky the circles under your eye sockets are getting dark enough that they'll blend into the darkness above them.

You aren't sure what you're trying to achieve. You and Frisk are wrapped around each other in a way where you cannot keep this up forever, because forever for the two of you is genuine and unquantifiable and takes place within a very finite space.

You're boned.

\-----

Naturally, it's only three more days before Frisk finds you curled up under the table of your sentry station in the dead of the night chugging mustard and it takes all of your willpower not to cough the whole bottle back up into the snow.

「What the fuck are you doing?」 The two offending letters fly by so fast that you almost miss them but it is almost as startling to see them curse as it is to see them there at all. If they didn't do so so smoothly you'd think they were trying on adulthood like too-big clothes. What on earth have they and Toriel been bantering about, tucked away in the Ruins together?

"hey, language--" But there are hands in your face screaming at you about your attempt to misdirect. Frisk wants to know what the fuck you are doing and you know for a fact that your discomfort is showing on your face for once and they haven't even gotten to the big surprise yet. You gulp nervously, as if you're some sort of cartoon character. What the fuck _are_ you doing? Did you honestly think that any good could have come of running from something that could very well be perfectly benign?

Frisk is looking at you the way they did as they cracked your sternum out of the rest of your ribcage, the way they did as they ground your cervical vertebrae under one tiny little foot, the way they did as their mouth formed the shape of a laugh while slamming a rock through your skull. You're as close to hyperventilating as anything that doesn't need to breathe can get. You don't think that you could tell them _what the fuck you're doing_ even if you wanted to. Focusing your vision sounds like a feat.

They catch on to this quicker than most would. There are gentle letters being formed with a single fingertip on the top of your skull, that you initially flinch away from but repeated simple assurances of "OK" are more soothing than they ever should be.

As soon as they can verify that it's okay to have further contact with you they have you wrapped up in their arms.

They're telling you with their arms under your shoulder joints that they didn't mean to scare you, never ever wanted to scare anyone they didn't mean to and you're more than impressed. You're barely able to sign comprehensible sentences in front of you, let alone mirrored and too close to another body. You want to put your admiration into words but the only thing that comes out is a pathetic croak followed by a sob.

You'd never been a crier before you died a few times. Frisk is still insistently shaping their digits into attempts to placate you. They have to spell a lot of things manually because they can't form signs that use their body as a prop and it's upsetting when they spell your name like they did when they first started talking to you after they somehow came to the realization that not killing you for sport was an option.

This seems to occur to them to and they roll away from you, briefly ending up face-down in the snow. You manage a laugh at that and they burst back up smiling, sign your name with the hand they aren't pushing themself up with. They aren't even wearing a jacket. You're a terrible friend and a worse guardian.

「Sans, I won't hurt you.」 It's so sincere and understanding that it makes you hate yourself for having a reaction in the first place. It's okay, it's okay. Will you talk to them now, please? They're still smiling but sadder now.

"it's not your fault, kid. i'm okay. i'm fine." It grates out of your mouth like metal on bone. "we can talk, just please tell me what you want to talk about before i lose my head."

(If it's a joke about your beheading in some version of history, it's lost on them.)

「We're sick.」 You go ahead and assume that they aren't speaking about any sort of physical ailment and so you don't understand why being sick warrants talking. You've been sick for eight years. You've been sick since just before they got here, and for all you know they've been sick their entire life.

「We can't move because we're sick. I had a flash back. I hurt mom.」 It's times like these that their ten year-old vocabulary is especially apparent, the words are executed smoothly but they're simple and Frisk uses two separate words because they have no comprehensive sign for flashback. You don't know if there even is one, since your own knowledge of sign language is limited to basic communication, engineering terminology and some things you've picked up from Frisk themself. It scares you that they didn't seem to have signs for death or killing before they started speaking to you, that they still use "hurt" as a catch-all.

"do you really think that's why we're stuck here?" Spite bleeds into your words and you feel immediate guilt. Frisk doesn't react but you add, "please don't leave me."

「I won't go. But you have to try. You haven't moved. Be determined.」 So their signature sign comes out. You smirk a little and nod tentatively. You think about how much sign language you could've taught them if you _had_ moved and feel a pang of regret. They were always so busy and you were always so busy standing still.

"is that all? is that what i was worried about?" Tears are threatening to well up in your eyesockets again. Frisk looks thoughtful.

「Help me. Please.」

What you don't say is, "i've been helping you." There's not enough truth to it, you barely put in the effort to make sure they stay alive beyond the Ruins, you barely put in the effort to keep _yourself_ alive. You don't remember the last time you went out of your way to escort them as you did through the first handfuls of their pacifistic journeys.

You don't remember the last time you went out of your way to do anything.

What you do say is, "of course, frisky. i'll do my best this time."

「Next time.」 You know they have you ensnared on that one. _This time_ is a promise but _next time_ is a commitment. Next time is resigning yourself to a lot of next times, and next time is having to finally face that the possibility of next times means that yes, this is real, this is your life. This is Frisk's life too. More than anything.

「Important.」 They don't specify, but they're looking at you like they mean you. That's a possibility you were never prepared for in all of this, and it breaks you to pieces.


End file.
